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What is postservice float?

HIM Connection, June 15, 2004

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Postservice float is the period between the service and an organization's claim for service transmission to its payer. The HIM department can keep postservice float to a minimum because a claim cannot go to the payer without diagnostic and procedural codes.

Some facilities establish a bill-hold period of 1-5 days. The period often will depend on the ability of patient-service departments (e.g., laboratory, radiology, operating room, etc.) at your organization to post their service charges to the claim file. Failure to do so quickly will result in your facility filing amended claims-a practice frowned upon by third-party payers.

The extra filing effort adds to the workload of patient financial services. The payer may also ask you for copies of the patient records, thus adding to the HIM workload as well. The efficiency, or lack thereof, of the service departments contributes to the postservice-float period and causes unnecessary work for others.

Your department must have the record coded with the bill-hold period. Doing so means the claim will process through the edit cycle as soon as the hold expires. The edit cycle is a cleansing process that the claim goes through to identify data discrepancies before it goes to the payer or clearinghouse. A report available the next day shows the errors found for the patient financial services staff to work through and resolve. If you process this report in a timely fashion, you can keep postservice float to a minimum.

Another document, the "discharged-not final billed" (DNFB) balance, captures the account balances of records that remain uncoded after the bill-hold period expires. The DNFB balance does not solely represent uncoded accounts, it could also include claims that have not passed the edits and have not yet been corrected. Organizations often set goals for DNFB. You can tie goals directly to your cash-flow needs or attempt to achieve the productivity level of your peers.

This week's excerpt is adapted from the book More with Less: Best practices for HIM directors. To order or learn more, click here.

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